David McElroy

I’m still looking for my place in this world.

In reality, though, I’m trapped between two worlds. I was born into a flesh-and-blood world which is ruled by a mindless culture which feels cold and indifferent at best, angry and evil at worst. At times, I glimpse another world — a world in which love and decency and compassion lead us to connection with a creator who is often hidden.

I’m a part of both worlds, but I want to live more and more in the world of the spirit. More in the world of love. More in the world of this creator spirit who I know as God.

There are times when I want to rage against the dysfunction and the evil of what modern popular culture has become. That’s partly because what I see seems so wrong, but it’s partly because being immersed in that culture keeps us from seeing the spirit world.

So there are times when I’m angry about the world in which I’m living, when I’m filled with confusion and hurt and outrage about what we have created.

But this is not one of those times.

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Ray Bradbury wrote a short story in 1951 that has haunted me since I first read it as a teen-ager. And as I walked the streets of my neighborhood late Thursday night, I saw the perfect illustration of what Bradbury warned us about.

I snapped this photo with my iPhone as I passed a house close to home. These people have a television set that’s almost as big as the massive front window of their house.

As I stood there in the dark street, I watched a house where the television set was larger than life. The people inside were apparently engrossed in a movie. Their cat and I were still in the real world, but their real world seemed to have been consumed by a giant television.

“The Pedestrian” is a simple tale about a man who walks in his own neighborhood every night. It’s about a man who hasn’t changed himself to become what his culture has demanded that “normal” people become.

Tonight, I felt like the man from the story.

But the people inside this house are the normal ones who conform to what our culture offers. I’m the iconoclast who sees hidden danger in what my culture offers me in a shiny package.

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My father was an ideal product of the American public education system from the middle of the 20th century.

Neither of his parents finished high school, much less attended college. His father had quit school after the sixth grade in order to help support his family. They were smart people — and my grandfather was incredibly well-read — but nobody in previous generations had even thought about being educated at a university.

The boom in taxpayer funding for colleges after World War II enabled both of my parents to go to college. They met as students at Jacksonville State (Ala.) University and married right after graduation. Both started their careers as teachers. My father soon moved to Southern Railway, where he was an executive in the Safety Department.

He had been well-prepared for corporate life in 20th century America. He was successful and he was paid well. When I was young, we lived the upper-middle class lifestyle in various cities as he was transferred around the South.

But something was wrong in his heart or his soul.

He didn’t learn what really mattered in life, not when it mattered. He lived in ways that caused three wives to leave him for good. He embezzled millions of dollars from an employer after he left the railroad. He treated his three children so badly that all three eventually cut off contact with him.

In the final months of his life, he was thinking about killing himself. After his death in 2018, I discovered a journal he had been keeping. What you see above is the last page of the journal, just six months before he died.

My father’s education had been badly incomplete. He had been taught how to make a living, but he never learned how to live a good life. And that might have been what killed him.

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